


Thursday

by Deejaymil



Series: Original Stories by a Bored Australian [10]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood, Death, Flash Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 23:12:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17610851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: This Thursday is different.





	Thursday

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited July 2019.**

On Thursdays, she gets to buy a pie and a choccie milk for lunch. It’s the best part of the week. On Thursdays, there’s double maths and after recess they have a spelling test, but then at lunchtime she gets her brown paper bagged lunch from the tuck shop and it’s always _awesome_. Heavy black texta says her name across the front, ticks _meat pie_ and _chocolate milk_ , and adds prices down the bottom. Mum does it every week when the pays come in.

Thursdays are good days, but this is a different kind of Thursday.

They find out after lunch. There’s a special assembly and their teachers get them all up from reading time and walk them duckling-style down to the hall. The girls hold hands and the boys shove and they’re all a bit tired because it’s almost home time. She doesn’t shove or hold hands with anyone, because Dylan is her friend and he’s not here today. And she knows this is a _different_ day as soon as they walk in, because the room feels like being quiet. A noisy kind of quiet. There’s a teacher crying, against the wall and hiding her face so they don’t see. Most don’t. Some do. She does.

Those that do start the noisy quiet, made of rustles and coughs and sniffs and two hundred kids trying to work out why they’re not at reading time. It’s Thursday, so there’s a brown paper bag in her pocket that smells like pie that she forgot to chuck in the bin.

The principal gets up in front of them and says things. Quiet things. His voice is soft and she doesn’t really hear him, but she hears enough. They always talk about things like this; about looking both ways and not playing near the quarry cos you could drown and die, but on this day no one actually says which of these things Dylan did wrong, so she doesn’t know why he’s dead. No one sits next to her and she stays when everyone else leaves. Some are crying too, like the teacher, even though they weren’t his friend and she was and she’s not crying.

The room gets empty and turns the quiet kind of quiet and a teacher holds her hand and takes her to the office. They give her a choccie milk and it doesn’t taste very nice at all.

She never really likes Thursdays after that.


End file.
